Val Vigoda
American electric violinist and singer/songwriter
Valerie "Val" Vigoda is an American electric violinist and singer-songwriter. She is best known for writing and starring in musicals including Striking 12 and Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, the latter of which opened Off-Broadway in 2017, touring internationally with Cyndi Lauper, Joe Jackson, and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and for her one-woman concert "Just Getting Good" which has toured nationally.
Early life and influences
Vigoda was admitted to Princeton University at the age of 14, withdrawing after one year to complete her classical violin training. She returned after a few years, graduating with honors and a degree in sociology.
Career
Vigoda founded the musical trio GrooveLily in 1994, originally naming it The Valerie Vigoda Band, along with Brendan Milburn and Gene Lewin. In the 1990s, Vigoda toured with Cyndi Lauper, Joe Jackson, and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
Vigoda has a one-woman show Just Getting Good in which she both sings and plays the six-string electric violin while utilizing live-looping. Her work has received positive feedback, with The New York Times calling it "exhilarating", The Boston Globe describing it as "a thrilling trip", The Washington Post praising Vigoda for "unleashing a diva-worthy torrent of passion", and Palo Alto Weekly crediting her as "truly amazing, an awesome vision of embodied musicality, moving as one with her violin, making it sing and singing along with it in a voice both smoky and angelic".
She is the lyricist and star of the musical Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, which has been produced at ArtsEmerson, George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, and Seattle Repertory. The show went into previews off-Broadway at Second Stage on April 14 and opened May 7.
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This entry incorporates text from “Val Vigoda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.